


cryin’ for no one (no one but you)

by villklovn



Series: love me like there’s no tomorrow [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: 1960s, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Drug Addiction, Falling In Love, Fluff and Angst, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Mild Language, Period-Typical Homophobia, Sad Ending, Some soldier OCs, Time Travel, Vietnam War, from Dave’s POV, no beta we die like ben, part of a series but can be read as a stand alone, the series will eventually be a post-canon fix-it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:34:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21638176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/villklovn/pseuds/villklovn
Summary: Klaus Hargreeves, it turned out, only got more interesting the more he got to know him.As if appearing out of thin air was not enough, he was undeniably the weirdest, craziest and wildest person Dave had ever met, and he could not, for the life of him, stop thinking about him.OrDave, Klaus, and falling in love.
Relationships: Dave/Klaus Hargreeves
Series: love me like there’s no tomorrow [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1560166
Comments: 35
Kudos: 142





	cryin’ for no one (no one but you)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hermitreunited](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hermitreunited/gifts).



> This is supposed to be the fourth installment of a series of one-shots that is still not completed. 
> 
> However, this can be a stand alone and the stories coming before this would be prequels to it, so I will post them once they’re finished. 
> 
> This one is canon compliant and technically the entire series would be, but some of it will be set post-canon so it will probably be jossed lmao. 
> 
> Just FYI, this is practically 3k words of Dave being very very gay for Klaus. Hope you enjoy!
> 
> (This is not beta’d but it will be after I post it because I have no Self Control™ and need to post it NOW.)

What Dave would later remember of the day Klaus Hargreeves dropped into his life, quite literally out of thin air, was very little and very confusing. 

It was a night at the end of April, and Dave was resting on his very uncomfortable cot, too tired to even think of complaining about his stiff back, when a weird whooshing noise and a brief flash of a blue light made his eyes snap open. 

At first, he thought, _oh, shit, it’s a bomb_. And then, _I’m going to die_. He almost closed his eyes again, preferring to wait for death without looking at her in the eye, but then he noticed something quite extraordinary. 

In the exact place the light had been, there was a man, sitting on the floor, nearly naked if not for the dirty and bloody towel around his hips and the ratty black coat on his shoulders, blood on his face and hair and a strange briefcase clutched in his hands. 

Their eyes met immediately, and Dave knew he looked like a complete mess because one second earlier he had been sure he was about to die, and a moment after – _well_. He wasn’t quite sure what he felt when he first saw him, not back then, but it was _something_. 

The man’s head tilted to the side like a confused cat, his eyes wide and so, so green, looking at him as if to ask, _can you help me?_ – probably thinking that Dave knew more than him, which was unfortunate because Dave himself had been there for barely more than a month and was just trying to keep himself alive long enough to go home and make his mama proud. 

Their brief but intense staring match was interrupted by the loud noise of a bomb going off, an actual one, this time, and Dave jumped up, now completely alert and awake, getting himself ready and only half paying attention to the weird ( _magic_ ) guy who now sounded very confused and scared and made his heart tighten in understanding, but who also looked like he could get Dave in a lot of trouble, with the makeup on his face and those green, green eyes. 

He lost sight of the man for a while, until they reached the bus, at which point Dave thought, _oh, fuck getting in trouble, he looks lonely_ , and damn his bleeding heart, he was going to get shot in the back for being a queer in the army and get thrown into an unnamed grave – and he wouldn’t even be sorry, because at the very moment he introduced himself to the guy, all his fears dissipated, and he found himself nearly giddy. 

“I’m Dave,” he said, smiling, and really he was just trying to be helpful in a horrible place and the new guy looked scared and alone and he couldn’t stand it. He didn’t even think about anything else, really. Not at first.

And then the guy smiled, his lost, tired eyes brightening up, and he suddenly became the most beautiful person Dave had ever seen. “Klaus,” the other man replied, and fuck getting shot in the back, those eyes felt like a bullet to the chest. 

That was how it began. Slowly, but not as slowly as one may expect. As Dave soon learned, Klaus was either the bravest man he would ever meet or just very, very stupid, because he was unashamedly himself and wore his heart on his sleeve in a place that was created to slowly chip away at your soul until nothing remained but a perfect little soldier or a cold body with empty eyes. 

In a place filled with death in every crevice, Klaus brought light, brought happiness and joy and freedom Dave never realized he needed, but which quickly became the very reason he would fight for. The reason he would get up and do his best in order to survive that hellish war – no longer just to make his family proud, but to also make his new ( _magic_ ) friend proud of him (or even just to protect him and spend time with him, really, he had very little expectations). 

A guy like Klaus, who was quite clearly a hippie and probably not the kind of guy who’d make an honest woman out of some girl, whose body was decorated with weird tattoos and who spent more time high than sober, who smiled bright and laughed wild and looked into Dave’s eyes for way longer than was safe – a guy like him didn’t belong there, he should have withered away, in the army, facing death at every corner. 

And yet, somehow, Klaus thrived in the field. He barely flinched at the sound of gunshots, at the screams of his comrades, at the dead bodies and the blood and the stench of decay. He didn’t look, to Dave, like the kind of man who would (or should) be used to violence – but Klaus Hargreeves, Dave would come to find, was always full of surprises. 

He was quick on his feet and shot straight, in spite of whatever illicit substance he had in his system, and could be as silent and deadly as a snake in the grass. A fairy in a battlefield, who wasn’t kicked out just because they were desperate to have as many men as they could get, and, yet, he managed to become friends with most guys in their unit, partly because he didn’t really give a shit about whatever insults would be thrown at him, but mostly because he ended up inexplicably saving their asses more than once. His flamboyance didn’t matter, then, not when he was reliable and useful. 

“Just luck,” Klaus would say, grinning, when asked how he knew where the unexploded mine was or that there was an ambush waiting for them behind the blanket of trees. “A little birdie told me,” he would quip, and Chaz would cuff him upside the head and roll his eyes at him. (Then Klaus would turn and wink at Dave and Dave would smile tightly, trying to force his heart to beat normally.) 

Klaus thrived in the field and was a good soldier, but he was still human, and like most of them, he would wait for night to fall before letting himself go. Dave would hear him sob under his blankets, after the worst days, like after he had shot a Charlie that looked too young, or when he had seen the small body of a local child held by his grieving mother, or when Miller had succumbed to an infected wound after it looked like he’d actually recover. Klaus would cry and whisper _sorry, sorry, sorry_ , and Dave always wondered who he was apologizing to, what was it that made him stare at empty corners with such terror in his eyes. 

They became friends very early on, not long after Dave shook his hand on the bus on his first day, because Klaus was wild and special and bright and colorful in a sea of army greens and because he was everything Dave wished he’d be brave enough to become. Klaus himself probably appreciated the fact that Dave was kind to him because, as Dave learned, not many had been before.

Klaus Hargreeves, it turned out, only got more interesting the more he got to know him. As if appearing out of thin air was not enough, he was undeniably the weirdest, craziest and wildest person Dave had ever met, and he could not, for the life of him, stop thinking about him.

“Where are you from?” he had asked him once, while eating their rations, in the earlier days, when he’d just arrived. 

Klaus had stopped shoving food down his throat to look at him. “The future,” he had said, and then had laughed when Dave punched him in the shoulder. 

Klaus quickly learned how to get his hands on drugs, just the right amount to be still really high but not so much that he wouldn’t be able to fight or defend himself. The times he was high, when his pupils were blown and his eyes were dark, his smiles came easier and his laugh was louder, but he didn’t look any happier to Dave, just better hidden under his manufactured mask. 

Whenever he couldn’t find enough drugs, he would be sweaty and skittish and jump at nothing and stare at empty air and whisper to himself, but none of that was weird in Vietnam. Dave assumed it was withdrawal and would try to offer his comfort as much as he could, because it was hard to see his friend in pain and he felt like he needed to protect him (and he wanted him to smile, too, but that was more of a personal secret). 

Three months after Klaus appeared, and long after Dave had come to the realization that he was completely smitten with the guy, they had a week-long break in Saigon. On the first night they went to a club, and that was when things changed. 

Klaus didn’t have any clothes to wear that weren’t army-issued, and so Dave loaned him some money to buy something appropriate for a night out with the other guys, and of course Klaus had to go and get the shortest top he could find – _fuck_ , Dave was fairly sure it was a woman’s shirt – which lead to Dave having to repeatedly force his eyes away from the small line of skin showing above Klaus’s pants (the guy was going to be the death of him, he was sure). 

They went to the club, and the music was loud and the alcohol was cheap and the girls were fun to dance with, although not exactly the kind of company Dave was looking for, and Klaus moved wildly and bumped into everyone and Dave was just as bad as him. They crossed their arms when drinking shots and their eyes met more than once, but whenever that happened Dave had to look away from that piercing gaze, because his heart was racing and Chaz was just beside him and that was not the right place nor the right time (and it probably would never be, he feared). 

But then they danced some more, even when the others had left with some of the girls, and it was just Dave and Klaus, while the other people around them blended into the background, as they let themselves be swept by the music. They were very very drunk when Dave bumped into Klaus, a song by the Doors blasting through the speakers. 

And then they looked at each other for a long, long moment, and those burning green eyes stayed on his as Klaus’s head slightly turned towards a secluded area behind a beaded curtain, a subtle but clear invite to follow him. At that point Dave thought, as he often did when it came to Klaus, _fuck it_. The guys were gone, the locals wouldn’t care, and he was way too drunk to resist the siren call of Klaus’s slightly too knowing smile. 

He followed him, Jim Morrison’s raspy voice slurring the lyrics as they shuffled along, trying to be as discreet as two drunk guys could be, and once they were sufficiently hidden they leaned onto a wall and talked about something that made Klaus’s eyes sad and his expression torn and Dave’s heart squeezed at that – but he immediately forgot what he said, then, because at some point he put his hand on Klaus’s face and _kissed_ him. 

(“Where are your dog tags?” he had asked, just because he was nervous and his brain was mush and the only thing he could see was Klaus’s tiny top and that was a slightly more polite question than “ _can you take it off for me, please?”_

“I don’t have ‘em,” Klaus had said. “Nobody would care if I died, anyway, no one would look for me,” he went on, eyes soft and far away and so, so green. 

“I would,” Dave had said, without a moment’s hesitation. “I would care. I would look for you,” and that was when Klaus’s walls had fallen down and Dave had needed to do something to wipe that expression off his face, and so he had kissed him.)

He had surprised himself with that, because Dave Katz was never brave or bold or daring, and yet this skinny, weird guy with tattoos on his hands and track marks on his arms took all his inhibitions away and made him not give a shit about everyone else and just care about how _right_ it felt to hold him in his arms and press his lips against him.

It was not a good kiss, not by a long shot, sloppy and messy and awkward but also heartfelt and sweet and when they pulled away and their foreheads touched Dave could see that Klaus’s eyes were teary, and Dave blamed the alcohol for that – but Klaus would later tell him it was because it had been years since the last time he was held as gently and carefully as Dave had done, and then Dave’s eyes became teary, too, as he kissed him again, gently, slowly, promising he would never stop if Klaus just said the word. 

That was the beginning of a long series of trysts in the jungle and stolen moments in the dark – and some of the other guys probably knew what was going on between them, but as the months went by and exhaustion enveloped them all, they never cared enough to say anything (although some of them did look slightly envious of what they had). 

It was a quiet night, a couple of months after Saigon, and they were laying beside each other on the rough grass and looking at the sky as the others slept, enjoying the rare calm of the jungle. The stars were painting figures above their heads and Dave had to muffle his chuckles as Klaus found the weirdest ones. 

“Look at that, Davey,” he whispered. “Those stars together look like a centipede,” he pointed, taking a drag from his joint. 

Dave huffed out, amused. “Love, I think the centipedes might be in your brain because I don’t see shit,” he muttered, nose scrunching as the acrid smoke drifted to his face. 

Klaus laughed at that, a hand on his mouth to stifle the sound but his shoulders still shaking with mirth. “I really am from the future, you know,” he said then, quietly, head propped up by Dave’s shoulder, their hands intertwined. 

“Are you, now,” he chose to humor him, because as much as he loved that crazy, wild boy he had no trouble admitting that he wasn’t quite right in the head. That was probably what made him as entrancing as he was, Dave reflected. Klaus wasn’t quite right in the head, and Dave loved him with all his heart because, of all the people he could have chosen, Klaus had chosen someone as boring and normal as _him_ and yet managed to make him feel special. Almost as special as Klaus himself was. 

Klaus hummed. “I can also see ghosts,” he added. “But only when I’m sober. Miller says hi,” he added, smiling softly. 

Dave believed him, because of all things, Klaus would never be cruel enough to joke about their young friend, not after he had spent nights crying about his death in Dave’s arms. If Klaus thought he could see Miller, then Dave believed him. And if the drugs helped stop his hallucinations, the ones that scared him so much and distracted him from the very real dangers of the war, Dave would help him find all the drugs he needed. If Klaus asked him to, Dave would embrace him and read to him and kiss him and dry his tears and hold his hands ( _hello_ , _goodbye_ ) for however long he wanted. 

Klaus was completely batshit crazy and had hallucinations and self medicated with loads of drugs, and he probably couldn’t really see ghosts and didn’t come from the future, but he definitely was a bit magic, because he’d appeared into his life out of thin air, almost like he was made exactly for him, for Dave – and sometimes Dave thought that it actually was a bomb, that night, and that he died and was just having a death induced hallucination, or maybe he was just dreaming and would soon wake up alone, realizing that Klaus was just the product of his imagination. 

But then Klaus would smile at him, and kiss him, and tell him he loved him, and hold him and sing songs Dave had never heard before, and then Dave would realize that there was no chance he could have made him up because not even his dreams were as wonderful as Klaus. 

(“I love you, Dave,” Klaus had whispered one night, one of those nights they had spent out of the tent, out in the field, one of the few times they could actually be close to one another. His voice had been soft, secretive, probably thinking he was asleep.  
  
But Dave had opened his eyes and looked at him. “I think I love you, too,” he had murmured back, his heart galloping wildly inside his chest, and he had truly, finally felt brave for once. “I really really love you,” he had repeated, and then he had kissed Klaus’s tears away. 

They had fallen asleep under the stars with their shoulders touching, as close as they could be without risking too much.) 

Time went by both horribly slow and scarily fast after Klaus’s arrival, as they proceeded to the front lines and fought and killed and were hurt and had close calls and made promises and cried and held each other and got arm tattoos with their unit (and secret matching ones on their chests) and fell earth-shatteringly hard for each other and kissed and _loved_ – 

And then, just as fast as it began, it ended. 

It was night, ten months after Klaus had appeared in the tent, and they were in the middle of a brutal fight. Dave had his rifle in hand and his love right beside him, just as he had been since the moment they had met (and as he would be forever, were it up to him.)

Suddenly Dave heard a soft, whistling sound, but didn’t really pay attention to it, more focused on the Charlies in front of him and on the warnings yelled by his crazy boy.

“ _Christ_ on a cracker–”

But then, suddenly, he couldn’t move, and a burning pain spread across his back and chest and his throat filled with blood and _he couldn’t move_ and Klaus was – 

“That was a close one, huh, Dave?”

Klaus was –

“Dave?”

– Klaus was _there_ , grabbing him, turning him around, and Dave looked at him and immediately felt calmer, the pain and the weakness and the fear dulled in favor of the warmth of his lover’s hand on his cheek, and he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t tell Klaus how much he loved him and how much grateful he was to have him in his life, however short it was, but Klaus was _there_.

“Please stay with me, Dave, stay with me–”

– Klaus was there, holding him close, looking at him with those beautiful, _beautiful_ eyes of his –

“No, no, no, no, no, no, _no–_ ”

Klaus was there, and nothing else mattered, and he was crying and screaming and Dave’s ears were buzzing and his chest was spasming and there was a metallic taste in his mouth, but he could see the shape of his name on his lover’s lips and he wasn’t afraid, he never could be afraid when Klaus was with him. 

He looked up, and saw the sky, dark and deep with its shining stars watching over them, like silent guardians, and then he looked at Klaus again, his green eyes brighter than any star could ever be and so, so green, even in the dark, full of tears and sadness and, really, Dave’s only regret is that the last time he would ever see Klaus, his magic boy wouldn’t be smiling or kissing him but crying and screaming and calling for a medic. 

But, Dave thought, there were worse ways to die than in the arms of the love of his life. 

Blood bubbled out of his mouth when he tried to tell him – tell Klaus that he loved him more than he had ever loved anyone else in his life, tell him to run, to live, to not leave him and yet to leave and be safe, but he couldn’t say anything, he couldn’t say goodbye or ask for one last kiss or even smile at him because his lips were going numb–

His sight faded suddenly, but he could still feel Klaus’s arms around him, his lips whispering prayers against his forehead, tears mixing with his own blood. 

One moment he could feel Klaus–

“–No, no, no, _please–_ ”

And the next he couldn’t feel anything at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the song “No One But You (Only the Good Die Young)”, dedicated to Freddie after his death. 
> 
> It’s one of my favorite songs, but also extremely painful because of its meaning. It felt fitting because while this story focuses on their relationship, you also already know how it’s gonna end. 
> 
> Or... do you?


End file.
